UNICEF scales up funding appeal for children in northeast Nigeria

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said here Thursday that it has revised its humanitarian appeal for Nigeria from 55 million U.S. dollars to 115 million dollars to assist an additional 750,000 people who can now be reached across conflict-affected areas in the northeastern part of the West African country.

As new areas open up to humanitarian assistance, the true scale of the crisis brought about by the extremist group Boko Haram and its impact on children is being revealed, the UN agency said in a press release issued here.

An estimated 400,000 children under five will suffer from severe acute malnutrition in three states across the northeast this year. More than four million people are facing severe food shortages and 65,000 people are living in famine-like conditions, mostly in the Nigerian state of Borno, the worst affected state.

"Children's lives are literally hanging by a thread," said Afshan Khan, UNICEF's director of Emergency Programmes. "We are reaching new areas to provide critical humanitarian assistance but we need greater international support to further scale up and reach all children in dire need."

The destruction of whole towns and villages further complicates the response. Sixty percent of health clinics have been partially or completely destroyed and 75 percent of water and sanitation facilities require rehabilitation in Borno state.

Nearly one million children are now displaced across the northeast, a million are out of school and hundreds of thousands psychologically affected from the horrors they have lived through.

The conflict-related lack of access to children has also lead to an outbreak of polio in Borno state, where three cases of wild polio virus were confirmed in August and September. UNICEF's funding appeal comes as a series of massive coordinated emergency polio immunisation and nutrition campaigns in northeast Nigeria and neighbouring countries is underway, targeting 1.8 million children in Borno state alone.

The immunisation campaign is also identifying and treating children with severe malnutrition, the UN agency said.

UNICEF has increased its response in the areas worst-affected by the Boko Haram conflict since April, supporting basic health care and nutrition for children and mothers, and helping provide safe water and sanitation, child protection services and learning opportunities.

Since the beginning of 2016, 2.6 million conflict-affected people have been given access to UNICEF-supported preventative healthcare services and nearly 75,000 children have been treated for severe acute malnutrition in northeast Nigeria.

The construction and rehabilitation of boreholes has provided nearly half a million people with improved access to safe water. Safe learning spaces, teacher training and educational supplies have helped over 72,000 children to restart their education and some 133,000 children have been provided with psychosocial support.

To date, just 28 million dollars of the 115-million-dollar appeal has been received and this presents a serious obstacle to UNICEF's scale up plan.

The Borno State has been a stronghold of the extremist group Boko Haram and has been frequently raided in the past six years. In past months, The Nigerian government has launched several military operations to eliminate the terrorist threat.

Boko Haram, which seeks to impose strict Islamic law in northern Nigeria, has been blamed for some 20,000 deaths and displacing of more than 2.6 million people since 2009. Enditem